Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Music

How An Irish Playwright Found The Soul Of Bob Dylan

About a quarter way into Conor McPherson’s play with music, “Girl From the North Country” (running through Sunday, December 9, at the Public Theater in lower Manhattan), a bible salesman unaccountably mutters this apparent non sequitur:

Big storm’s coming, my boy. Here. Europe. Everywhere. You ever wonder what woulda happened if the Jews met the Vikings? Huh? The Vikings! You know what they would done to the Jews?

It’s winter 1934 in the depths of the Great Depression. The place is a rooming house in Duluth, Minnesota. The music upon which the play is built consists of 20 Bob Dylan songs, more than half of which, it’s fair to say, are lesser-known numbers, primarily from the 1970s and ‘80s, most probably unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated Dylan fans. The drama is in how the complicated, intertwined lives of the dozen-plus main characters in the house intersect at a liminal moment in time, when not a slow but a fast train comin’ down the line will shatter the inertia that has kept these folks together in bonds of love, blackmail and deceit.

The play is Dylanesque in theme and execution, propelled and informed by the Nobel Prize-winner’s songs, which are delivered in surprising but perfect arrangements and performed by a cast of gorgeously talented singer-actors (including Mare Winningham). The songs mostly illuminate the play’s emotional truths at the same time that the play’s action often redefines the truth of the songs. That’s quite a feat to pull off, with all credit due the playwright, who is also the director.

This is by no means a “jukebox musical”; it has more in common with some of Dylan’s more impressionistic forays into film (“Renaldo and Clara” and “Masked and Anonymous”) and the feel of some of his more elaborately sketched-out story songs (e.g., “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”). The play’s concerns are Dylan’s — race relations, economic inequality, criminality, messianism — and the characters are right out of his songs, which undoubtedly also accounts for the astonishing ease and logic with which the drama interweaves with the songs. It could have gone so wrong. You just can’t help but wonder, how did McPherson do this?

I don’t know what would have happened had the Jews met the Vikings. I guess it depends on where and when. But I also just can’t help but wonder if McPherson is having the bible salesman foreshadow the Holocaust at the same time he’s riffing on Bob Dylan himself. Is Duluth-born Robert Allen Zimmerman, who was raised in a small Minnesota mining town mostly populated by “Vikings” (also the name of the state’s very popular football team) or their literal or figurative descendants, what happens when the Jews meet the Vikings?

Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward and the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner, 2009).

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.